Supply Chain Software is Growing … Duh!

While I put no stock in industry analyst market sizing reports -- as a former analyst and numbers guy in my first job out of graduate school, I know the bull$hit methodologies that firms deploy, not to mention how vendors twist the numbers in their favor when asked to provide breakdowns -- I suppose that it's a validation of our market that supply chain management software revenue grew 17.6% in 2007, according to Gartner. Still, it's worth noting that it's not just actual demand growth contributing to the high rate, as a "weakened U.S. dollar resulted in the growth rate increasing approximately 4 percent". What else does the report suggest? Supply and Demand Chain Executive does a good job summarizing the key takeaways. To wit, "SAP and Oracle continued to be the market leaders, with SAP holding the No. 1 position with 22.4 percent of SCM software revenue in 2007 (see Table 1). Oracle was the only other vendor to have double-digital market share (at 16 percent)." Ariba -- which Gartner considers a "supply chain vendor" for the purpose of this study (go figure) -- is further down the list with $160.3 million in 2007 revenue, representing only 2.7% of the market.